Video Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Deep Green Resistance Blog

Deep Green Resistance “After Dark” short video

This short video gives a glimpse into social interactions in the life of a Deep Green Resistance member, friend, or family member. There’s a lot of good food, talking, laughing, good food, playing, learning, and some good food. This footage was taken after the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) in spring 2015, and shows a group of DGR attendees and presenters relaxing after their days of sharing and learning.

DGR After Hours from KITTYHAWK on Vimeo.

If you’re interested in joining us as we build a culture of resistance, please visit our website: Join Deep Green Resistance.

Why civilization must be stopped

Most of us born into industrial civilization assume that this is the way things are meant to be, and that any comforts and elegancies we can derive from its systems of exploitation are well deserved. Rarely are we willing to question what our culture will leave for future generations, or how it impacts other species and people around the world and right next door.

We in Deep Green Resistance feel it necessary to examine and challenge the dominant way of life, for both ethical and practical reasons. The short video below, portraying civilization from the perspective of some of the oldest people around, illustrates why.

If you’d like to help stop this omnicide before it’s too late, join DGR and a growing culture of resistance!

Lierre Keith on “Peak Moment” discussing The Vegetarian Myth

In March 2011, the popular video series “Peak Moment” interviewed Deep Green Resistance author Lierre Keith about her book The Vegetarian Myth. Keith summarizes, with well-researched eloquence, some of the primary myths of vegetarianism:

Eating vegetarian is good for our bodies
Eating vegetarian is good for the earth
Eating vegetarian will stop world hunger

Keith, formerly a long-time vegan herself, explicitly acknowledges and honors the morals, values, and passion that vegetarians and vegans bring to the struggle against factory farming and unethical and destructive food production. But she asks them to examine these “vegetarian myths” to get to the root causes of our horribly dysfunctional systems. Throughout the conversation, she stresses the primary problem of civilization and its prerequisite of agriculture, which requires a shocking amount of energy to fight nature. Maintaining monocrops is a never ending war. Whether to feed caged animals on concrete, or to directly feed humans, this is a war we can’t afford to win.

Read a transcript of the interview or watch the video below, and if you’d like to learn more, we highly recommend reading the full book: The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith.

For more videos featuring Lierre Keith, the other DGR authors, and DGR members, visit Deep Green Resistance on Youtube or our Member Appearances page for both audio and video.

Chris Hedges on the State of Extraction: exploitation, capitalism, and patriarchy

Chris Hedges spoke last weekend at the State of Extraction conference at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. While most speakers focused exclusively on natural “resources” ripped from the planet, Hedges brilliantly linked this environmental devastation with the social impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism on our most vulnerable populations. He challenged the narcissism, individualism, and identity politics that have come to dominate modern culture, including most of the left. He identified as especially insidious the widespread acceptance of prostitution and pornography: no other subjugation is so widely rationalized and dismissed as these abuses of women. Even in so-called progressive and radical circles, sexualized violence and racism are fiercely defended where no one would try to justify such violations in any other circumstances.

In fact, Hedges was temporarily deplatformed from the State of Extraction conference precisely for calling on the left to recognize the war against women as part of the larger colonialist project, in his recent article amplifying the voices of women on the front lines. Even in venues actively opposing the status quo of capitalism and extraction from the earth, any challenge to the accepted wisdom of patriarchy is met with knee-jerk attacks and an unwillingness to listen. We’ve seen this again and again in recent years as radical feminist speakers have been silenced: deplatformed from venue after venue, threatened with rape and murder, and attacked in vicious smear campaigns. The only thing unique about this latest incident is Hedges’ position as a privileged white man.

Deep Green Resistance strongly advocates for a radical view of our interlocking crises, environmental and social. We need to get to the root of our problems to fashion effective solutions. In our FAQ Is DGR a Feminist Organization? we explain:

Right now, patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. Women are just another resource for men to use in their endless quest to prove their toxic masculinity and breed soldiers for civilization’s constant state of war. The masculinity and the war—against people, against the planet—together have created a perpetual motion machine of domination and destruction of the land and human rights. This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, since, as Sheila Jeffreys points out, fascism’s root is ultimately the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.

Please ponder this as you watch Chris Hedges give this amazing and truly radical speech:

Trigger warning: Besides the generally disturbing nature of this subject, Hedges reads a graphic account of a brutal rape from minute 46 to 48.

Also read DGR member Jonah Mix’s analysis of the speech and male backlash against it: When “Paternalism” is Worse Than Commercial Rape: #StateofExtraction and the New Manarchist.

Vulnerability of infrastructure to cyber attacks

In November, Admiral Michael Rogers spoke to the House Select Intelligence Committee on Cybersecurity. Rogers, the National Security Agency (NSA) Director & U.S. Cyber Command Commander, spoke on the vulnerability of U.S. infrastructure to cyberattacks due to the proliferation of network technologies which are relied upon for that infrastructure’s functioning. Sectors of the economy vulnerable to cyber attacks run the gamut, from energy to oil and gas to government to aviation. In his assessment, no major part of the interconnected global economic system is not vulnerable to cyber attacks.

While this hearing focused mainly on the threat that foreign nation states pose to the U.S., the topic of non-government groups committing catastrophic attacks on infrastructure was brought up as well. In comparing the cyber threat to the nuclear threat of the Cold War era, it has been determined that the cyber threat is a much greater risk because of the ease with which groups with few resources can gain the tools necessary to commit potent attacks, whereas obtaining nuclear weapons is much more difficult.

Main points:

Foreign powers (China, Iran, and Russia) have the capability to inflict damage on critical U.S. infrastructure through cyber attacks
Primary concern is this nation state threat
Secondary threat is gangs/ groups (nation states have been using these groups to execute probing as well as attacks, in order to obscure their own fingerprints)
Types of attacks used:
- Distributed denial of service (DDoS); not a sophisticated attack, but can do a lot of damage in large scale/ high velocity attacks
- Sophisticated viruses (Iran)
- Trojan horse malware (Russia)
Main targets to worry about:
- Energy sector (foreign powers have been probing for weaknesses and have gained access to control systems, which could allow nation states / groups to shut down those systems)
- Financial systems / institutions (major threat)
- Oil and gas infrastructure
- Water distribution and filtration systems
- Government
- Aviation
Attacks can be segmented to perform different kinds of things (cut off power transmissions to specific sectors, turn off specific generators and turbines, etc.)

Watch the full hearing to learn more about cyber vulnerabilities of infrastructure.

Ocean Apocalypse: video lecture by Jeremy Jackson

In January 2013, Dr. Jeremy Jackson spoke at the U.S. Naval War College on the multitude of negative impacts of industrial civilization on the oceans of the world. Jackson is a Senior Scientist Emeritus at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, with decades of experience studying oceans around the world. He knows and cares about oceans and presents his depressing information in a succinct and engaging manner.

Jackson asks three crucial questions:

What are the most important human impacts on the oceans and their consequences today?
What are the projected consequences of these changes for the environment (and thus for human well being)?
What can we do to prevent these things from happening?

Jackson does an excellent job answering the first two questions. This video is important viewing for anyone who wants to learn about the desperate state of the oceans and their certain collapse if business as usual is allowed to continue.

Unfortunately, though he identifies the major threats as pollution, overfishing, and climate change, he doesn’t tie these together into a necessary broader critique of civilization. His proposed solutions, with a focus on green technology hopium and voting in the “right” leaders, are almost entirely useless.

Watch Ocean Apocalypse now, learn from Jackson’s summary of the problems, then consider the Deep Green Resistance Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy as an actual plan to save the oceans.

On the Side of the Living: DGR documentary in progress

Deep Green Resistance just completed a $10,000 fundraising campaign to create a feature length documentary on the need for organized resistance to the dominant system of industrial civilization: On the Side of the Living. Thank you to all who contributed money or helped spread the word!

Two videos that give an idea of what the documentary will address:

The Deep Green Resistance Strategy gives a good introduction to our general approach to strategic activism.

Exclusive interview with Doug Zachary of Veterans for Peace.

Standing on Sacred Ground film series

Deep Green Resistance stands with indigenous peoples in defense of their land, for both ethical and practical reasons. It’s simply the right thing to do when people are threatened with theft of their traditional land base. It’s also a highly effective way to preserve what’s left of biodiversity and a living planet. Like any long-term member of a community, humans who know they depend on their land for sustenance and life foster its health to the benefit of everyone there.

The World Bank calculates that although indigenous people comprise just 4% of the global human population and live on just 12% of the land surface, their territory encompasses 80% of planetary biodiversity. Clearly they’re doing a better job of fostering life than has any civilized culture. We can be most strategic in supporting these people in protection of this remaining biodiversity on their traditional lands.

The film series Standing on Sacred Ground explores these dynamics and looks at specific cultures and places in 4 DVDs. You can see multiple excerpts on Youtube, including “Sacred Sites and Biodiversity” featuring clips from Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Ethiopia.

Robert Newman’s History of Oil

Geopolitical history, though critically important to understanding real life today, is generally pretty boring. Stand-up comedy, though highly enjoyable when done well, is generally pretty meaningless. Robert Newman’s genius is in combining the best of both worlds on the subject of oil: “the terrifying 100-year history brought to life.”

In a scant 45 minutes, Newman covers a lot of ground. He starts by highlighting British and US adventurism, interference, and warmongering from WWI, through the 1953 CIA replacement of Iran’s democratic government with a dictator friendly to the US, to the present occupation of Iraq (sold by governments and corporate media to the public with a straight face and no apparent shame as “bringing democracy to the middle east.)

He also touches on peak oil, its implications on our food production, and the fact that “there is no way out.” His coverage of the problem is good, though he concludes with a plea for society to pursue widespread implementation of green technologies and renewable energy. (See the Deep Green Resistance presentation “False Solutions of Green Energy” to understand the problems with that as a solution.) It’d be great to see him instead work the strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare into his pitch.

Though you may already know some or much of what Newman presents, he probably has some surprises for you, too. This is a very pleasant way to brush up on history, even for those who consider themselves apolitical and normally uninterested in this sort of thing. Share with your friends and family!

Myths of Biofuels presentation by David Fridley

In 2007, David Fridley of Lawrence Berkeley Labs and San Francisco Oil Awareness presented a well researched and thorough debunking of the idea that biofuels are sustainable, environmentally friendly, good for farmers, or a path to energy independence. Fridley and his audience approach the issue from an industrial-human-centric standpoint concerned about peak oil, rather than from a holistic earth-centric and anti-civilization perspective, but his presentation is excellent for what it is. This is a great way to get up to speed on the dramatic, across the board problems and limitations of biofuels.